God and Israel and the Democrats

That floor fiasco over the party platform was reported as the Democrats ‘booing God.’ Which is only partially true.

Some of the booing was over the platform amendment changing the reference to Israel, though the amendment covered both and caused a floor fight. Which, as everyone paying attention to this stuff at this point knows well by now, went weirdly through multiple stages of negative statements, followed by denial and charges of misreporting, followed by evidence that the reporting was accurate which led to spin of the original point all along. Followed by the floor vote on the amended wording in the platform.

Here’s just one snip from CNN:

Anderson Cooper openly mocked the Democrats’ attempts to brush past the controversy surrounding changes to its platform on Wednesday night.

Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz appeared on the network to discuss the rancorous opposition to the insertion of new language about God and Jerusalem into the platform. Wasserman-Schultz told her interviewer Brianna Keilar that there had been “no discord” when the platform was amended. It was an audacious statement to anyone who had seen the footage of the boos and shouts that came when the amendments were proposed — as well as the fact that convention chair Antonio Villaraigosa had to try three times before he got a result he was satisfied with.

After Wasserman-Schultz’s interview, Cooper did a verbal double-take. “That’s an alternate reality,” he said. “From a reality standpoint … to say flat-out, there was no discord, is just not true.”

Right. The party doesn’t entirely know what it stands for, but in its official statement it claims to stand for more radical ideology than Democrats in recent history ever did.

Connect the dots. The week opened with that welcoming video saying that “government is the only thing we all belong to.”  It was Orwellian.

Fast forward through all the celebration of abortion, with all the shouting and yelling about reproductive rights, and the sanctimonious spin about gay marriage and the complete lack of reference to the battle for religious freedom, and you get to the platform fight over adding the mention of God. That’s directly connected to the rest.

First thought I had was of the EU hammering out a constitution and two popes imploring Europeans and their leaders not to rewrite history and deny their Christian heritage and reject their very identity. Fortunately, Dr. Paul Kengor had the same thought and expressed it with keen insight.

The God opponents were the predictable Western European progressives: leftist Eurocrats in Brussels, Labor Party atheists in Britain, German socialists, Scandinavian secularists, and, naturally, the French leadership. The God supporters included new EU member states that survived godless communism—with Poland in the forefront—and the continent’s preeminent religious figure: Pope John Paul II.

The pope, suffering from advanced Parkinson’s, took up the fight with vigor. In the summer of 2003, he devoted a series of Sunday Angelus addresses to this political issue that transcended politics. He made arguments akin to those made by the American Founding Fathers: It is crucial for citizens living under a constitution to understand the ultimate source from which their rights derive. Their rights come not from government but from God. What government gives, government can take away. What God gives, government cannot take away.

So to the point of contention at the DNC in Charlotte:

That the Democrats, in 2012, would find themselves in a similar battle is no surprise.

Now this is interesting…

I’ll never forget the night Barack Obama won the 2008 election, when I turned on CNN and glimpsed an unknown Republican congressman from Wisconsin named Paul Ryan. When asked about Obama’s victory, Ryan said he was most concerned about “the Europeanization of America.”

“That’s it!” I said to myself. “That’s exactly it. Who is this guy? He nailed it.”

A further “Europeanization” of America is the best description of what has transpired under the Obama administration, especially its first two years under a fully supportive Democratic Congress. In 2009-10, we witnessed incredibly wasteful Keynesian-style prime-the-pump “stimulus,” partial nationalizations, “Obama-care,” explosive public-sector growth and unionization, demonization of the banking and investment and oil industries, stagnant unemployment, class-warfare rhetoric unlike anything I’ve ever heard in this country, and debt-to-GDP ratios approaching Greece standards. We’ve experienced a record-long non-recovering recovery reminiscent not of the American experience but of Western Europe…

Here in America, the staunchest liberal-Democrat areas, such as California, Massachusetts, and New England, all have European-level birthrates, divorce rates, abortion rates, and even church attendance. New England, in many ways, is a microcosm of Western Europe.

By the time of the 2012 Democratic convention, party delegates had already (following Barack Obama’s lead) embraced everything from unlimited taxpayer-funding of abortion to gay marriage. How does one get to these positions? Answer: by removing God. Fittingly, then, the delegates merely need to take the next evolutionary step: exclude God.

The heads of that party have been making strident moves to do that in a number of ways, but nothing as brazen and sweeping as the HHS mandate that by federal fiat relegates religiously informed consciences to powerlessness, and religiously run businesses, insititutions and social ministries to the morally bankrupt position of being neither able to practice or preach what they believe.

The fact that the practially non-existent ‘accommodation’ is so narrow it wouldn’t even apply to Jesus is not an unintended consquence.